Keeping It Real (18 page)

lives. I hope you're not
the jealous type. I don't
like being alone all the time.'

'Can we get
back to the woods for just a moment?' Lila insisted. "The elf agent shot you in the

shoulder. Don't you
care
T

"They're out to get me.' The tip of one ear flicked dismissively.

'And I can't find you in the records.'

'Bullshit,' he said. 'You're looking in the wrong place, Sherlock. You're looking in Alfheim, and you're

looking in Otopia, but you

aren't
reading the Demonia listings
.
I'm right there, next to Sorcha, under the family name, Ahriman
.
'

'You're an elf
.
A High Elf, by the looks of your face
.
'

'Yes,' he said. 'I am that too. And you, pretty robot? What are you apart from a half a ton of metal and

attitude?'

Lila checked his claims on the records via Incon Tree and saw that it was true. Zal Ahriman. 'But Zal

isn't your real name. Ahriman isn't either. Not the first
name.' The record did not
show previous names,

only the nickname
.

'Of course not
.
How stupid do I look? You think I'd survive ten minutes in Demonia under my real

name? Elves are their favourite torment-toy.'

'So, you weren't born there?'

'Well, duh.'

'Is that how Sorcha woke you up from whatever Dar's arrow did?'

'It wasn't the arrow. It was the elementals. And yes, that's how. And no, I will not tell my name to you.

And no, I don't know what the arrowhead did. And yes, I do care, but I can't do anything about it. And

no, I will not stop the tour. And now I will not answer any more of your annoying questions because you

can't be bothered to do your homework.'

Lila felt so angry she couldn't speak. She mastered it with stillness
.

'Come on, Lila girl,' he said, in the same way that
Sorcha spoke
.
'You've got a bit of the devil in you,

you know it
.
Sometimes you should let her out, or else she'll go bad on you when you least want her to.'

His
andalune
body touched her suddenly, invisibly. She felt it like a feather against her face, where the

scarlet stain met her ordinary skin. It ran under her clothing, down her arm, over flesh and metal. It had

the most peculiar qualities; the lightness of strength, the coolness of intense desire.

'Leave me alone!' she stood up, her head pounding suddenly. She didn't know what she wanted to do,

but she wanted to do something violent
and powerful and physical.

'Okay,' he said and the touch was gone. 'But anyway. Were you shitting me about the drugs? I drank

way too much last night.'

'Oh yeah, why's that?' Lila did have things that
would work for Zal. Being an elf they weren't the same

things that a human would take for alcoholic poisoning. 'Intravenous, or by mouth?' Lila thought
of the elf

agent's face when Lila had injected her, the woman's obvious disgust
mingled with fear and loathing.

Zal considered it, then held out
his arm. 'Spike me,' he said.

Trust him to be cussed about it, Lila thought
.
She took hold of the offered hand, his left, the one that

had been emptied out by the ghost
and was now perfectly whole when it should be dead or missing,

yanked into I-space. She tried not to notice the way his skin felt
as she examined the inside of his elbow.

She ran her finger over one of the green veins close to the surface
.
A spark travelled up from their point

of contact
into her chest
and she felt
something inside respond, as though a living thing jumped inside her

ribcage and the space around it
was a big empty cavern. Wild magic. The stupid Game.

She found herself staring into Zal's eyes.

Instead of directing the medicine to her arm she directed it as if she was going to give it to herself, into

her mouth. It was all the Game. She didn't care.

'Just nod if you can hear me,' she told him as he looked surprised when she let go of his arm and took

hold of his jaw in her hand. Or maybe it was the Pink Floyd lyrics that surprised him. 'Relax. I need

some information first.'

'Just the basic facts,' Zal replied, smiling with bemusement and leaning backwards until he was all but

lying flat on the tideline of pillows that covered the bed.

'It's just a little pinprick,' Lila said. She bent down and kissed him. She expected all kinds of tricks.

She didn't expect him to kiss her back as tenderly as he did, nor to feel his hand against her face, which

made her in turn let go of her medically effective hold on him and slide her hand along his neck where she

felt the smooth action of the muscles there and the blood beating in the pulse below his ear as he opened

his mouth to her
.

The medicine trickled out below her tongue, bitter and sweet, its synthetic macromolecules copying the

fancy tricks of real Alfheim plantlife. Zal looked directly into Lila's eyes as he tasted it and she felt both

his hands on her head as he deepened his kiss.

His transparent enjoyment and the depth of his immersion in the experience of the moment
shocked

Lila. She couldn't
escape the strongest feeling that what she'd meant to be a tease and a joke, a needle of

a different kind, was an act equivalent to what she'd seen him do in Zoomenon - a sacred thing. Wild

magic rippled in an electrical

fizz along the conduits of her spine
.
She saw it
in Zal's eyes as he pulled away from her, lips wet, mouth

open, pupils expanded into dark horizons bigger than any human eyes
.
He was panting and she was now

completely immersed in his aetheric body - a full embrace of such sudden intimacy that
it confused her

utterly.

Lila didn't know any words now but she didn't like the feeling inside
.
It was too much, too big, too

strange and connected to the Game, connected to him and to the moments she'd been thrown back and

poisoned by Dar, connected to Sarasilien's cool hand on her forehead.

She pushed away from him and stood up quickly
.
She was so hot, she had to get out
.
Stupid. She

was stupid to do that
and think it was anything but
ordinary lust
and human need reacting to simple High

Elf glamour.

'Comfortably numb,' Zal said softly, eyes glazed, his touch all gone from her. He lay still, spreadeagled

in the sheets.

'Is that what you do with the elementals?' she asked.

'I'll show you, next
time,' he offered, and she had no doubt he meant it. There was a complete change

in him. His attitude had gone, replaced by this terrifying sincerity and that Alfheim cool assurance she

couldn't stand and couldn't stop wanting to watch.

Lila brushed her hands across her mouth and swallowed the traces of the drugs. They made her feel

heady and too energetic. She looked anywhere but at him.

'Well,' he said after a moment, sitting up. 'I hope that taught you not to go starting fires.'

T did not start the Game,' she snapped. She noticed that
the main room had gone quiet
and knew that

Poppy at least must be earwigging for all she was worth.

Zal raised one eyebrow. 'I was talking to myself. I'm going to get up. Thanks. I'll be sure and get

drunk more often.' He waited, pointedly.

'Oh right!' Lila said in exasperation and turned her back. She used sensors in her back to watch with

instead and caught him smiling to himself, at her, in that
annoying patrician way of someone who thinks

they're winning. She was going to try for a smart retort but found herself looking at
the tattoo again as he

turned his back. It burned incredibly brightly, a yellow that was almost white. 'What is that supposed to

be?'

T should have known you'd have eyes in the back of your head,' he said and walked back into the

bathroom, closing the door.

Poppy was waiting for Lila in the lounge.

'If you say anything, I will kill you,' Lila told her before she had time to open her chrysoprase green

lips.

The faery smiled and crossed her legs in mid-air, floating easily as she rattled ice cubes in a tall glass,

'Juice with your ice?'

Lila shook her head and tapped her temple. T have a call to make,' she said and went
into her own

room.

She called Williams. When the woman answered she said with less awkwardness than she felt, 'I want

to talk to you about
Dar and the mission in Alfheim.'

'Okay,' the doctor replied calmly. 'Go ahead.'

'We went
into Alfheim as part
of the diplomatic corps,' Lila began, when she was convinced that their

secure link couldn't
be eaves-dropped upon
.
'I was one of three agents for the NSA Otopia who went to

the embassy in Lyrien. We did all the usual work there. I was never good at elvish really, so I didn't do

much contact - you know how sniffy they are if you get
a consonant
out of place. Well, I was in the

offices and I used to deal with all the border control documenta-tion
.
We'd look over it all very carefully,

because there was a suspicion that
someone in Alfheim was collecting big game magical artefacts and

using couriers to bring them in.

T used to check all the records as closely as I could and then go and try to verify them by following up

on some of the items that were listed, and some of the ones that we thought had come in without customs

declarations. I'd pose as a courier for Otopia Postal Service and say that some box or other hadn't been

checked and that I wasn't allowed out of Alfheim until I'd got proof of purchase or an invoice or some

other piece of information, Sometimes I just asked for a picture of the object and took that
with my

camera. Anything to trace where the stuff was going. Plenty of it
was perfectly legit of course
.

'Then Customs and Excise got a lead on one of these couriers when a packet of

magicopharmaceuticals she was carrying internally burst and killed her
.
She actually gave herself up as

she was dying
.
I saw her talk to them. She wasn't
making a lot
of sense - it
was a necromantic drug

meant to let the users travel through Thanatopia without
dying. Weird because you don't get many elf

necromancers obviously, what with their feelings about life and death, but
she'd got far more than a single

dose and she was walking two worlds and her body was packing up by the time I got there. Nothing

could have saved her. She hadn't
known

what she was carrying until the drug took her into Thanatopia. Well, she found out and met up with some

other of her ex-associates in Death - they'd been murdered by their masters you see, after finishing their

deliveries - she decided to go along with their wishes and tell the authorities what was going on, try and

undo what was being done. But there was a spell on all of them which prevented them talking about
it

directly
.
So she wasn't
much help
.

'Before she died we managed to figure out
that
the stuff was being taken beyond Lyrien, into Sathanor
.

At that
time there was a diplo-matic mission going out to Sathanor on a rubber chicken visit to cement

the trust that Alfheim wanted to show in Otopia now that the immigration acts had been sorted out
at
last

.
So I went
as part
of the cortege into Sathanor, as a PA to the Ambassador
.

"There was another agent
with me, Vincent De Palma, another Otopian spy. We were under

instructions to look for anything that looked like it might link up with what this woman had said. He was

very keen.' Lila paused for breath, then carried on.

"The thing about
Sathanor is - it's very beautiful, like you dream that nature intended, like Eden.

Everything is more itself there, even than in the rest of Alfheim. When you go you can see how the elves

and the elementals are related magically
.
Skies are bluer, trees more majestic and individual, stones are

more solid, rivers wilder - everything has its own spirit
that
you can feel, like ultra-authentic We used to

call it whiskey-country, you know? Because it was distilled from hundreds of gallons of ordinary things

into this incredible, rich, sensual, spiritual stuff.

'So, we were in whiskey-country and we were kind of drunk on it, and all the elves were a bit
too, but

they were used to it, so they'd laugh at us because we were all stoned the whole time and that
made

spying really hard. When you were there you realised that
in Otopia, though the elves have aetherial

bodies that you can sometimes feel if they want
you to, they're just disconnected there, but in Alfheim

you realise that
they're not
disconnected any more. The
andalune
is a part of them that's connected to

the land and the sky and the whole place, like my Al-self connects me to the Otopia Tree. Except
in